The Long Fault: Poems

In THE LONG FAULT, Jay Rogoff considers how the disasters of human history scar the individual psyche and how our creative acts of art and love help us to resist this damage. The poems explore sacred and secular history, including wars as ancient as Troy and as contemporary as Iraq, and incidents of mass violence from the Middle Ages to modern times. They simultaneously enlist the power of all forms of art as an ally in confronting disaster and helping us proceed. In a great variety of forms, both traditional and experimental, Rogoff's poems meditate on the long fault into which we will all tumble. Like Hamlet staring into the eyes of Death, THE LONG FAULT resists the encroaching dark with the imaginative sympathy, strong lyricism, and strange humor that powerful poetry can provide.

Literature & Fiction

Rogoff, Jay

Poetry

Louisiana State Univ Pr

In The Long Fault, Jay Rogoff explores how the disasters of human history scar the individual psyche and how our creative acts of art and love help us to resist this damage. After opening with Cain launched into exile―“from the good book hurled / out to beget the world”―Rogoff then sweeps us along in his imaginative wanderings, pondering our mortality through the means and powers poetry makes available. The poems explore sacred and secular history, including wars as ancient as Troy and as contemporary as Iraq, and incidents of mass violence from the Middle Ages to modern times. They simultaneously enlist the power of all forms of art as an ally in confronting disaster and helping us proceed. In a great variety of forms both traditional and experimental, Rogoff’s poems meditate on “the long fault” into which we will all tumble. Like Hamlet staring into the eyes of Death, The Long Fault resists the encroaching dark with the imaginative sympathy, strong lyricism, and strange humor that powerful poetry can provide.

LSU Press

George Balanchine, one of the twentieth century's foremost choreographers, strove to make music visible through dance. In The Art of Gravity, Jay Rogoff extends this alchemy into poetry, discovering in dancing -- from visionary ballets to Lindy-hopping at a drunken party -- the secret rhythms of our imaginations and the patterns of our lives. The poems unfold in a rich variety of forms, both traditional and experimental. Some focus on how Edgar Degas's paintings expose the artifice and artistic self-consciousness of ballet while, paradoxically, illuminating how it creates rapture. Others investigate dance's translation of physical gesture into allegorical mystery, especially in Balanchine's matchless works. Rogoff pays tribute to superb dancers who grant audiences seductive glimpses of the sublime and to all of us who find in dance a redemptive image of ourselves. The poet reveals dance as an "art of gravity" in the illusory weightlessness of a "dance that ends in mid-air," in the clumsiness of a Latin dance class's members "trip- / ping over each other in the high school / gym," and in the exploration of ultimate Gravity -- a sonnet sequence titled "Danses Macabres." Ultimately, Rogoff confronts with unflinching precision the dark consummation of all our dancing.

The Art of Gravity: Poems

The Art of Gravity

Praise for Jay Rogoff "[Rogoff's] poetry takes a visible art of movement and translates the feelings it evokes and the history it records into delicate words.... But Rogoff also has an amazing knack for the humor in humanity, as a slew of death-defying poems demonstrates." -- Andrew Burstein, The Baton Rouge Advocate "Quite simply, I love the gravitational, poetic pull of Rogoff 's work." -- Renée E. D'Aoust, Notre Dame Review The poems in Jay Rogoff's Venera explore varieties of love, both sacred and profane, by drawing from the natural world, personal intimacy, and the human imagination as evoked in biblical narratives and art. Rogoff reveals how devotion's many guises collide to startle us: a husband consoles his wife after she is awakened by an imaginary child, a man daydreams of his kindergarten crush, Abraham's fear of God perplexes his love for Isaac, and the Virgin Mary, stunned by the angel Gabriel's inhuman beauty, contemplates the decades of purity that stretch ahead. In Venera's title sonnet sequence, inspired by visions of the feminine depicted in the works of Renaissance painter Jan van Eyck, such collisions evolve into collusions. As Rogoff weds elevated language to plainspokenness and sets the erotic alongside the miraculous, the beloved accumulates many identities -- everyone's mother and everyone's daughter, the laboring handmaid and the Queen of heaven, the fertile field and the elusive bride. Rogoff's poems allow us to ponder the contradictory human concoctions of love, detailing how they drive us to venerate the sacred while also submitting to the power of the sensuous.

Venera: Poems

In lyric poetry with the dramatic sweep of a historical novel, Jay Rogoff’s Enamel Eyes, a Fantasia on Paris, 1870 reimagines “the terrible year” when the Franco-Prussian War shook the City of Lights. The great comic ballet Coppélia had dazzled Paris and Emperor Napoleon III mere weeks before war erupted; in retrospect, the ballet’s obsession with a mechanical woman anticipated the conflict’s mechanized violence. Using multiple voices and poetic forms, Rogoff skillfully recreates the wonder and horror of these months of siege through the eyes of both ordinary and famous Parisians. From political figures like Empress Eugénie and artists including Edgar Degas and Édouard Manet to sixteen-year-old Giuseppina Bozzacchi and other dancers in the premiere of Coppélia, the characters of Enamel Eyes bear witness to a surreal year that changed Paris and the lives of its citizens forever.

Enamel Eyes, a Fantasia on Paris, 1870: Poems

Becoming Poetry: Poets and Their Methods (Lewis P. Simpson Award)

Essays & Correspondence

The Cutoff

Word Works

Able Muse, Winter 2022/23 (No. 30 - print edition): a review of poetry, prose & art (Able Muse, Print Edition)

Salter, Mary Jo

Kampa, Stephen

Le, Jenna

Brodeur, Brian

Campion, Dan

Glynn, Amy

Pepple, Alexander

Staples, Natalie

Able Muse Press

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